Whenever I drove past Esskursion (and so often I did), I always wondered what this curious storefront to Pirckheimer Straße was about – a large window right next to an antiques store (that one I got), with the yellow lettering and prayer flags on the window framing the long table you see behind it. Seemingly too small to be restaurant (with only one table that seats eight, maybe ten), it was not until my hipster friend asked me to tag along to a cooking class that I found out that Esskursion is, in fact, a restaurant – one-man-run by trained sushi chef and traveler Norbert Weidner, who brings his travels (to India, Thailand, Burma, Laos) to the table – à la carte at weeknights, and in cooking classes on weekends.

The classes start at 1 PM, perfectly allowing for you to build an appetite while seated at said long table in front of your chopping board (the only prerequisite to the cooking class being that you bring your own chopping board and knife) and listening to Norbert Weidner – a man who would travel 300 miles across India to beg the The Bangala head chef to teach him the secret to the Chettinad cuisine – telling of the origins of each and every dish.

So the Thai cooking class we went to was a wonderful afternoon spent in between chopping garlic, ginger, cilantro, passing on Nam Pla, garlic paste, green cardamom and getting carried away by the strange beauty any story of anything remote has to it. And while one minute you’re chopping chicken meat, secretly wondering how good this can actually taste (will be served on lettuce. Chopped chicken meat on lettuce? Well okay…), the next minute, after “Mr. Hana Bi” Norbert has spooned some toasted sesame oil onto the marinated meat and you’ve tasted its bold, aromatic warmth against the vinegary freshness of the lettuce leafs, to never let go of this taste ever again, all you want to do is dunk your face in it and stay forever so.

From the Pla rad prik (pan-fried fish) to the Gaeng massaman (beef curry), every dish another delicous stop on Norbert Weidner’s culinary world map, the food at Esskursion is by far the richest in taste of any place I’ve ever been to, with the place itself having such a homey feel to it, it brings to mind those times when you were lucky enough to score an invitation home from your roommate, and spent all Sunday afternoon at his mom’s tiny kitchen table, being fed and feeling less homesick.